The entertainment industry has become more diverse over time. With the advent of music video entertainment, the ability to dub in different information and provide a facility for the viewer or the listener to actively engage with the entertainment is now more available. There have been new technologies that have been developed as a result of the music entertainment. For example, Karaoke is very popular in Asia. In Karaoke individuals listen to music and read the words on a screen, watch the lyrics and sing along. It is of equal interest that many people are doing these same things within the confines of their home.
Karaoke entertainment involves participants which sing to a popular song in which the main vocal track has been removed. Many forms of Karaoke can exist including audio tape only Karaoke in which participant uses a script or memory for the lyric words, CD-ROM Karaoke which uses still or non-unique video off the CD-ROM to provide entertainment for the non-singing participants and color changing lyric words to aid the singing participant, and laser disk Karaoke containing unique video along with color changing lyrics. Typically such systems can change pitch but only by changing the speed of the song's play back, since the audio is inherently analog or streaming digital based information which is not buffered in any way. Revenue is generated either through admission fees collected from Karaoke bar or booth patrons or from purchases of disk or tape products at record or Karaoke shops.
Many draw backs exist which make multimedia music entertainment more difficult to enjoy or more costly to obtain. In music listening entertainment, for example, it is impossible to judge a song until it is aired and heard, with many songs on a given record never given air time. In music video entertainment air time is even more restricted since there are only a small number of cable channels devoted to music video entertainment. Both of these areas would gain immensely from an interactive system of access; they would gain even more entertainment value if creative participant interactivity could be added. The present invention addresses both of these points.
Several specific draw backs exist with existing techniques of Karaoke entertainment. First, often the medium of tape, CD-ROM disks, or laser disks require a purchaser to buy one tape or disk that contains a dozen songs although only one or two are of interest. Second, though some songs are used by purchasers many times, in the case of Karaoke bar, booth, or personal entertainment purposes it is common to use a given song only once or twice over a year, thus increasing the effective cost of the entertainment. Third, though there are thousands of Karaoke song titles, normal record stores or even Karaoke stores only carry a small proportion of the total produced titles. A last disadvantage of existing Karaoke systems is that they have only been used for one track of the full piece, the vocals; the present invention addresses all of the above-mentioned points.